FreeState

Over the past few months, we’ve had several conversations with planners and entrepreneurs in Melbourne, London and San Francisco interested in 'innovation clusters', which in a nutshell describes the creation of live places specifically designed to generate and drive knowledge capital. This is a focus for many sectors, is generally specific to city-size placemaking, and is especially interesting for its championing of social capital over pure real estate.

As a recent published New London Architecture (NLA) research paper Knowledge Capital: Making places for education, innovation and health and its excellent accompanying exhibition so beautifully illustrates, London is uniquely positioned as a world leading knowledge economy centre. Its extraordinary network of hospitals, universities and research centres and the fact of it being a significant player in the so-called knowledge golden triangle (which includes Oxford and Cambridge) are the key reasons as to why. Home to a knowledge cluster that includes the Francis Crick Institute, the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, the UCL Cancer Institute, the British Library, Google and Deep Mind, it is proud proprietor of a £3.7 billion research and development economy, one which makes provision of a million plus jobs. Early predictions as to the true value of ‘eds and meds’ as a key economic driver for the future city have been remarkably prescient.

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FREESTATE Over the past few months, we’ve had several conversations with planners and entrepreneurs in Melbourne, London and San Francisco interested in ‘innovation clusters’, which in a nutshell describes the creation of live places specifically designed to generate and drive knowledge capital. This is...